Here's what you wrote that I find to be way off base:

"If people chose to buy or build a home that's prone to hurricanes or flooding they should be responsible for insuring and protecting their investment. Not us."

Ok, Dale...the issue I see with this argument (and I don't know if I can call it "your argument" because it seemed to grow out of an attempt to diminish the responsibility of the Bush Administration by all the usual suspects, shortly after they saw they were going to have to absorb some of the blame) is that it can be turned and used in terms terrorism as well. In fact it has already and the people that use it tend to get crucified for it.

If you can say "it's their own fault, they chose to live in that area and got what was coming to 'em"...well...we could say the same thing about the victims of 9/11. They chose to work in a building that was a well known target for terrorists...it had been attacked before and was under a standing threat of attack. We could say anyone who lives near a major metropolis is putting themselves in jeopardy because those are areas that are known terrorist targets. Whatever happens to them then it's their own fault. Hey, they've been warned there's a war on terror and evil terrorists want to kill Americans.

We should all be like Dale, move to Maine, where there are no major terrorist targets, and buy a home that's not in a flood zone, or on a fault line where it could be swallowed by an earthquake, etc...we could work hard in Maine and only have to worry about our weekend chainsaw rental issues.

Obviously, I'm being a little sarcastic here but that's only because that whole "they should have known better" argument is such a joke. It arises from an attempt to deflect blame, it comes from people with a specific intent, and it's pure hogwash wrapped in faux common sense.

Hey, I don't know if you read my camel post below but this is all about asking the wrong questions so that the answers don't matter. It's the camel speaking to you, Dale.

Bushco and their media voices have once again done their best to confuse the issue, confuse the public, and basically betray us while certain folks profit from this tragedy.

And geez Dale, American money going to help our fellow Americans is wrong, but American money getting dumped into Iraq to "supposedly help ordinary Iraqis" while in fact most of that cash flow is going exactly where they want it to go and has little to do with ordinary Iraqis...well that's just peachy.

Ya know we coulda done a lot better by our fellow Americans down on the Gulf coast if we hadn't thrown billions upon billions into...ahhh...I don't know what we're calling it today...umm...does "reconstructing Iraq" work? Or should I call it "Building and sharing democracy"? I've lost track of all of the nice ways we can describe our fuck up over there...I mean we've all stopped calling what's going on in Iraq "fighting the war on terror" right? It's ok not to use that one anymore right? I mean the folks we're killing in Iraq now are "insurgents" not "terrorists" right?

I better go back to the drawing board on the semantics of this one...